Riding Lessons Books in Order

Annemarie Zimmer's story in Sara Gruen's Riding Lessons novels starts in the saddle and then drops her hard to the ground. Once an Olympic-caliber rider, she loses both her beloved horse and her future in a single catastrophic jump.

The first book, Riding Lessons, picks up twenty years after that fall. Annemarie is newly divorced and at loose ends when she returns to Maple Brook, her family's horse farm in New Hampshire, with her teenage daughter, Eva, in tow. Her father is dying, her relationship with her sharp-tongued mother is raw, and the farm's finances are shaky. In the middle of all this, she sees a red-and-white gelding whose coloring echoes the horse she lost, and old obsessions roar back to life.

The novel stays close to the daily rhythms of a working stable: feeding, mucking, training, and the small crises that come with every horse and rider. Around that, Gruen builds a knotty family drama about grief that never really went away, the strain between mothers and daughters, and the pull of the past. The setting feels grounded and practical, even as Annemarie makes messy choices and tries to figure out what kind of life she wants next.

In Flying Changes, Annemarie is nearing forty and still living at Maple Brook. Her relationship with Dan, the veterinarian who helped her back into riding, is serious but uncertain, complicated by the fact that she cannot have more children. At the same time, Eva is charging toward competitive show jumping, chasing the kind of dreams Annemarie herself once had. When Eva bonds with a powerful, unpredictable horse, Annemarie's old fears collide with her daughter's hunger to prove herself.

This second book leans into questions of control, trust, and how to parent a teenager who is taking real physical risks. Annemarie wrestles with anxiety, jealousy of her ex-husband's new family, and memories of the accident that ended her own career. Maple Brook itself changes as horses come and go, bills pile up, and the family has to decide what they can save and what has to be let go.

Across both novels, the tone stays intimate and emotional rather than sweeping or epic. The horses are never just symbols, but living creatures with weight, smell, quirks, and danger, and the books pay attention to the work required to care for them.

Read in order, Riding Lessons first and then Flying Changes, the series follows one woman from collapse to a fragile version of acceptance. Each book tells a complete story, but together they trace how a single bad moment can echo through decades, and how family, hard work, and a few remarkable horses help Annemarie find a way forward.